Police continue to keep suspect names secret

Local agencies ignore judge's ruling, stick with policies

5:08 PM,
May 24, 2014

File: Nearly a year after the crash that killed Frances M. Wilk, 85, on 17th Avenue in Wausau, the name of the driver who struck Wilk from behind at a high rate of speed remains a mystery to the public.

Written by

Shereen Siewert
Daily Herald Media

It has been 11 months since a traffic crash on 17th Avenue in Wausau left an 85-year-old woman dead, and police still are withholding a key detail about the tragedy: who caused it.

Authorities instead are adhering to a policy of blacking out or omitting the names in their reports of people arrested or involved in crashes, despite a Wisconsin judge's ruling in April that police cannot use a federal privacy law to dodge state statutes and keep such information secret.

That means the public might never know the name or driving history of the 51-year-old man who crashed into a vehicle driven by ...